


Assignment Null

by sovay



Category: Sapphire and Steel
Genre: Multi, POV Second Person, Technology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 15:29:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15342849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sovay/pseuds/sovay
Summary: Sometimes you try to remember if your laptop was always a pile of gossamer white gold.





	Assignment Null

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thisbluespirit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisbluespirit/gifts).



Sometimes you try to remember if your laptop was always a pile of gossamer white gold, or your clock radio quite so hot to the touch, or your phone a breaking wave of silver, frozen in time. You can't imagine why you would have bought such extravagantly artistic devices (or where you would have gotten the money for them once you did) and it is strange, every now and then, to realize that no one ever seems to notice when you pull a curiously light, wrist-coiling sculpture out of your pocket in response to a ringtone. If you think hard about it, you have to acknowledge that the laptop no longer has a keyboard as such, or a touchpad, or even really a screen, which doesn't seem to prevent it from streaming all of your favorite shows without a glitch or hint of buffering and scrolling through all the news of interest and social media with seamless cheer. You aren't sure that the radio always broadcast long strings of numbers and letters like mathematical equations or chemical formulae, especially not in three voices that fade in and out of one another, sometimes curt, sometimes cool, sometimes carelessly laughing; you are especially not sure that the third voice should sound so familiar, especially when you lie on the edge of sleep and see long, shifting chains of light and shimmer, like bright metal under water, moving as if between a person's plaiting hands. You wonder sometimes what would happen if you tried to answer it, if you opened the chiming curl of your phone and tried to slide your own voice, whose timbres and overtones are so very different, as if you were not even speaking with the same kind of muscles and air, between that triple braid of principles and reactions. You never try it: you always fall asleep first, the voices murmuring away into the vast depth of time that lies between dreams and waking, like two worlds that only slightly, occasionally breach. In the morning you check your e-mail, listen to music, not asking how a fine mist of wires with a soap-bubble sheen can perform either of these tasks especially when it does them so well. Your phone rings; you answer; the voices you hear sound simply like your own. How can you miss the spring of a step you have never heard, the angle of a smile you have never seen? How can you know that your phone was once plastic and silicon, and once you fell asleep without silver dreams?

**Author's Note:**

> [thisbluespirit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisbluespirit/) said, "And I often think, when technology fails, that Silver would come in handy, but then I wonder exactly what he would do with my broken/unco-operative tech and what it would do afterwards, or if it would even exist and reluctantly decide that maybe things are best as they are. (Maybe. ;-p)" Written February 2018.


End file.
